I’ve seen the future of education for all… and, frankly, it’s not worth obtaining

Civitas, 9 June 2009

Today marks the publication of Education for All: The future of education and training for 14-19 year olds, the long-awaited outcome of the five-year long Nuffield Review of 14-19 education and training.

For a mere $125, you too can become the proud owner of a hardback copy of what its publisher claim is ‘the most rigorous investigation of every aspect of this key educational phase for decades.’ Seeing as, until only yesterday, that period was not considered ‘a key educational phase’, the publisher’s boast is less impressive than it might at first seem.

More to the point, judged by absolute standards, the report is anything but rigorous.

I say this, not on the strength of the report itself which I’ve not yet read, and don’t plan to if I can help it, but of the twelve page summary available on Nuffield’s website.

Let me briefly justify my assertion. The Review chose to organise its investigations and recommendations around the answer that it gave to the following question: ‘What counts as an educated 19 year old in this day and age?’

To pose such a question already assumes that a 19 year old is capable of counting as educated in this day and age. This is a questionable assumption, but let that pass. Let us assume that, in posing it, what the Nuffield Review had been seeking to ask was: What competencies and knowledge can be realistically expected and desired in every 19 year old as a result of their formal education?

Certainly, it is this latter question that seems to have served as the starting-point for the ruminations of the Nuffield Review. Sadly, it does not seem to have provided a direct answer to it. However, one can easily be extrapolated from its preferred ‘understanding of [what] an education for all would provide’.(p.3). The answer runs like so:

By the time they have reached the age of 19, every young person can reasonably be expected to have acquired:

• the ability to manage his or her own life intelligently and make intelligent decisions about their future as circumstances change;
• a set of skills that has rendered them employable; and
• ‘moral seriousness’, a quality which, from what the lead director of the Review Richard Pring has written elsewhere written in elucidation of it, is coextensive with a morally responsible and well-balanced attitude towards life and other people. Pring writes: ‘I am talking about the young person who stops to think about how he should live his life, who commits him or herself to certain people or causes, who refuses to treat others as mere pawns in his or her game, who takes seriously any criticism of standards in behaviour or work; who finds challenging the exploration of what is right or worthwhile in literature or art or science, who cares about the environment and other social or political issues, who does not run away from the deeper questions of meaning and value and purpose.’ [Richard Pring, ‘Educating Persons’ (1997)]

‘Well’, you might be asking, ‘what’s so terrible about such a set of expectations?’

I will tell you.

It expects far more than it is reasonable or realistic to expect of any young person by the age of 19. Boris Johnson and David Cameron at that age were busy at Oxford wrecking restaurants and getting deplorably drunk, if still not more decadently intoxicated. Many members of the Cabinet were off junketing in Cuba or, as leaders of the NUT, busy organising student strikes and sit-ins.

If this is what our political elite were getting up to at that age, surely it must display a hopeless blindness to the human condition, and especially to the moral and intellectual fragility of youth, to expect so much more of all and every other young person today.

In any case, even assuming for the moment one grants the reasonableness of this, in my view, preposterously over-exacting set of moral expectations of young persons, it is left entirely unclear from the summary of the report (and I’ll wager my life the report itself makes it not the whit any clearer) in what way, from this understanding of the goal of education, any concrete curricular implications are to be derived, especially as they relate to the sciences and the humanities.

In the section of the summary entitled ‘recommendations’, there is a sub-section entitled ‘Curriculum’ and whose first recommendation runs:

‘The curriculum framework should introduce all young people to:

• forms of understanding which enable them to make sense of their physical and social worlds;
• opportunities to excel and have a sense of achievement;
• practical and economically relevant capabilities;
• issues of profound social and personal concern;
• information, advice and guidance for future career, training and education;
• knowledge, skills and experience which are relevant to the wider community.’ (p.11)

One can see how some of these curricular objectives relate to some of the qualities and competencies which the Nuffield Review considers it is reasonable to expect all of young people to have acquired by the age of 19. But I cannot for the life of me see in what way young people are to be helped in their acquisition by their being introduced to ‘forms of understanding which enable them to make sense of their physical and social worlds’ in so far as I can assign any meaning to this latter expression.

I take this latter expression to be referring to the natural and social sciences. But I defy anyone to explain in what way their study is supposed to render all who engage in it any better able to manage their own lives or more employable, let alone any more morally responsible and virtuous.

I am not suggesting that young people should not be made to undertake and cannot benefit from the study of the sciences, but, in so far as they all should be made to and can benefit from so doing, it cannot be thought its purpose is to equip them with any of the competencies and qualities on the list which the Nuffield Review claims it is reasonable to expect all young people to have acquired by the age of 19.

Among the various competencies and qualities whose acquisition by all it claims should be the purpose of the education of 14-19 year olds, the report fails to mention any that provide an adequate rationale for the inclusion of science in the curriculum for them.

If you would like a brief characterisation of what such a competence might be that does, I would say it was the acquisition of an elementary understanding of the natural and human orders. If you ask me why all young people today should be reasonably expected to have acquired such an understanding by the time they reach the age of 19, I would be hard pressed to give any reason beyond saying that, provided they have been educated correctly, they will then or soon after be glad that they were made to acquire such an understanding merely for the delight such understanding brings.

But the Report suffers from a much worse defect than merely not providing any adequate rationale for why all 14-19 year olds need to undertake some continued study of science during this period. At least it recognises that they should.

A far, far worse defect in the Report, from what is said about it in the summary, is that it fails to insist that all young persons between the ages of 14 and 19 continue in the study of art, music and literature. Arguably, moral seriousness, as the Review understands this expression, is something that can only be, or at least is best, acquired by means of these forms of culture. Yet there is no mention of any of these subjects in the curriculum recommendations of the Report.

It would be disingenuous of its authors in this face of omission being pointed out to claim that the need for their inclusion follows automatically from their recommendation that all young people be introduced to ‘forms of understanding which enable them to make sense of their social worlds’ and to ‘issues of profound personal… concern’. While works of art, music and literature most certainly can and do provide such forms of understanding and address such issues, we all know there are plenty of ways in which it is possible for these matters to be broached other than through study of such works, and in recent years it is precisely by means of these other ways less valuable ways that educationists and policy makers have preferred they be addressed: eg citizenship education, sex education, and whatever.

In sum, then, one of the main objections I would level at this Report is its combination of naïve unrealism in its expectations of young people with deep and pervasive Philistinism. It simultaneously expects far too much of 19 year olds — viz ‘moral seriousness’, and far too little of them. Namely, it does not demand that they all should continue to be exposed to works of high culture in the hope some of it will rub off and thereby eventually help inform and illuminate their lives as well as then offer them consolation.

It is not the only objection I have to the Review.

The summary states that: ‘The evidence leads inexorably to the conclusion that too little historical awareness enters into policy-making and government intervention.’ (p.5) I’ll second that, but another objection I have against the Report is that it is guilty of the very deficiency of which it complains. Had it not been, then, perhaps, it might have cast its net more widely in finding useful past precedents than simply the Newsom Report.

Had members of the Nuffield Review been genuinely concerned to learn more from history, then they might well have spent some of the last five years more profitably than they have by looking at what some earlier writers have said about what renders a person educated.

Here, for example, is what John Ruskin had to say about the subject in 1859. In a few sentences, he manages to say far more than the Nuffield Report does:

‘By a large body of the people of England and of Europe a man is called educated if her can write Latin verses and construe a Greek chorus. By some few more enlightened persons it is confessed that the construction of hexameters is not in itself an important end of human existence… [A]s to what should be the material of education… it can hardly be disputed what facts it is most advisable that a man entering into life should accurately know.

‘I believe, in brief, that he ought to know three things. First. Where he is. Secondly, Where he is going. Thirdly. What he had best do under these circumstances.

‘First. Where he is: That is to say, what sort of world he had got into; how large it is; what kind of creatures live in it; what it is made of, and what may be made of it.

‘Secondly. Where he is going: That is to say, what chances or reports there are of any other world besides this; what seems to be the nature of that other world’ and whether, for information respecting it, he had better consult the Bible, Koran, or Council of Trent.

‘Thirdly. What he had best do under these circumstances: that is to say, what kind of faculties he possesses; what are the present state and wants of mankind; what is his place in society; and what are the readiest means in his power of attaining happiness and diffusing it…

‘What, it will be said, and is all this to be taught to schoolboys? No; but the first elements of it, all that are necessary to be known by an individual in order to his acting wisely in any station of life, might be taught… to every school-boy… [T]he honourableness of every man who is worthily filling his appointed place in society, however humble; … the meaning of the term ‘Refinement’; the possibilities of possessing refinement in a low station, and of losing it in a high one; and, above all, the significance of almost every act of a man’s daily life, in its ultimate operation upon himself and others – all this might be, and ought to be, taught to every boy in the kingdom, so completely, that it should be just as impossible to introduce an absurd or licentious doctrine among our adult population, as a new version of the multiplication table…

‘The man who know these things, and who had his will so subdued in the learning them, that he is ready to do what he knows he ought, I should call educated; and the man who knows them not – uneducated, though he could talk all the tongues of Babel… Education then, briefly, is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them…’ [John Ruskin, ‘Modern Education’ in Stones of Venice, volume 3, Appendix 7]

Ah, well, la di da. Who cares a blind bit in public office today as to what truly matters so far as education is concerned?

Why, as of last week, the country no longer has a government ministry with the word ‘education’ or the name for any species of educational institution in its title.

I’ve seen the future of education for all and it doesn’t work — any more, sadly, than will a large number of those who shall be made to undergo it.